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When building a route on a map, the most difficult task is to find transfer points (from one station to another or to another mode of transport). If the total number of transfer points in the city exceeds 250, it becomes extremely difficult to navigate such a transport system and build a travel route. In most major cities, this limit is easily exceeded.
The number of so-called megacities (cities with more than 10 million inhabitants) has tripled since 1990. Currently, there are already more than 30 megacities, in which a total of almost half a billion inhabitants live. Of course, as megacities grow, their transportation systems also evolve and become more complex.
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In particular, more than 80% of cities with a population of more than 5 million inhabitants have a metro. Researchers from several French and English universities decided to find out how difficult it is to perceive and understand modern transport systems in megacities.
It is known that the ability of people to remember and understand the relationships between various elements is far from unlimited. For example, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has shown that the number of social contacts a person can maintain is usually less than 250, and most often limited to 150. This number is called the “Dunbar number”, it approximately corresponds to the maximum size of traditional tribes of hunters. -gatherers. Similar restrictions apply when reading transport cards.
As scientists note, when building a route on a map, the most difficult task is to find transfer points (from one station to another or to another mode of transport). According to them, if the number of all existing transfer points in the city exceeds 250, it becomes extremely difficult to navigate such a transport system and build a travel route. In most large cities, this limit is easily exceeded if the trip involves the use of several modes of transport (for example, subway and bus).
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The authors of the study compared the complexity of navigation in the 15 largest (in terms of the number of stations) subways in the world. It turned out that the most difficult to navigate in the New York and Paris subways, and the easiest – in Beijing and Hong Kong. The Moscow metro was approximately in the middle of this list. As studies show, if the complexity of a subway map begins to exceed the capabilities of the brain, passengers randomly run their eyes around the entire map, trying to understand at least something (when we look at simpler and more understandable schemes, we usually follow the lines with our eyes).
“The capabilities of the human brain are limited, and the transport systems in megacities are becoming so complex that these capabilities are no longer enough for efficient navigation. In particular, when there are many transfers from one station to another and from one mode of transport to another, it is very difficult to find the shortest route to the destination. Of course, computer programs and applications for smartphones can help here, but we need to seriously think about redesigning transport maps, ”says Mason Porter, one of the authors of the study, a professor of nonlinear and complex systems at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, Mason Porter.
Подробнее см. R. Galotti et al. «Lost in transportation: Information measures and cognitive limits in multilayer navigation», Science Advances, 2016, vol. 2, № 2.